Isao Hashimoto, a Japanese foreign exchange dealer turned multimedia artist, has produced this bird's eye history of the nuclear era in the form of an animated timeline map showing the 2053 nuclear explosions set off by seven nations between 1945 and 1998. Each second represents one month. Hashimoto used no letters in the film, so speakers of any language can follow it. In the last two minutes of the video, each nation's explosions are highlighted in turn, by location. Hashimoto drew on data assembled by Nils Olaf Bergkvist and Ragnhild Ferm, and co-published by the Swedish Defence Research Establishment and te Stockholm International...

15 August, 2010

Canadian-born child soldier and torture victim Omar Khadr, the only citizen of a western democracy still held in the US Government detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, went on trial this week in the first war crimes prosecution of a child soldier in US history. Under Stephen Harper, Canada is the only western country not to ask for the release of its nationals from the illegal prison camp. The Harper government has flouted court orders requiring it to take action in support of Khadr's civil rights. The U.N. Special Representative on Children in Armed Conflict warned Monday that the legality of Khadr's...

12 August, 2010

A column in the UK Guardian by BC writer Douglas Haddow predicts trouble for Canada's economy if an upcoming referendum in California succeeds in legalizing pot this November. [Y]ou may have noticed that Canadians have been behaving uncharacteristically uppity of late. This new-found swagger is a result of Canada having the dubious distinction of being the "least-bad-rich-world-economy" – an honour that would be rather unimpressive if the rest of the G8 wasn't so persistently gloom-stricken...

12 August, 2010

If the misbegotten attempt to sell NB Power doesn't flatten in NB Premier Shawn Graham, perhaps this Karate Kid tribute will do the trick. With fans like this...

12 August, 2010

Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim is the title of a 1980 compendium of unintended double-entendre headlines collected by the Columbia Journalism Review. It illustrates the power of tiny punctuation flubs — in this case, a missing hyphen — to radically alter meaning. Readers also have to chuckle in wonderment over how small a town must be for the local newspaper to deem dog bites newsworthy. When the dog is a coyote, however, and the person bitten is a 16-year-old girl in a National Park where a 19-year-old woman was killed by coyotes 10 months ago, there's no doubt about newsworthiness. Still, consider...

11 August, 2010

The US Transportation Safety Administration now keeps airspace safe from attack by snow globes, as well as toothpaste, mouthwash, and hair gel. A blog post by Patrick Smith, the airline pilot who posted this photo to his Flickr account, bores into the core irrationality of the phoney security restrictions citizens have acquiesced to since 9/11. Money quote: Conventional wisdom says the [9/11] terrorists exploited a weakness in airport security by smuggling aboard boxcutters. But conventional wisdom is wrong. What they actually exploited was a weakness in our mindset — a set of presumptions based on the decades-long track record of hijackings. In years...

10 August, 2010

The blobfish, highlighted in a New York Times slide show on ugly animals, is "practically all face — a pale, gelatinous deep-sea creature whose large-lipped, sad-sack expression seems to be melting toward the floor." An accompanying article explores the underpinnings of our aesthetic recoil: [C]omparative consideration of what we find freakish or unsettling in other species offers a fresh perspective on how we extract large amounts of visual information from a millisecond’s glance, and then spin, atomize and anthropomorphize that assessment into a revealing saga of ourselves. Wildlife biologists are far from immune to prejudice against the unbeautiful. [R]researchers found 1,855 papers about...

10 August, 2010

The Washington Post's Gene Weingarten longs for the way newspapers used to operate. On deadline, drunks with cigars wrote stories that were edited by constipated but knowledgeable people, then printed on paper by enormous machines operated by people with stupid hats and dirty faces. These days, by contrast: Every few days at The Washington Post, staffers get a notice like this: "Please welcome Dylan Feldman-Suarez, who will be joining the fact-integration team as a multiplatform idea triage specialist, reporting to the deputy director of word-flow management and video branding strategy. Dylan comes to us from the social media utilization division of Sikorsky Helicopters." Hat...

09 August, 2010

Reflecting on the Halifax Seaport Farmers' Market's opening day (previous posts here and here), Contrarian reader Jeff Pinhey writes: You are kidding me.  An American Homeland Security regulation, the one requiring a Port Security plan in all ports with ships leaving for a US port, causes that silliness?  Let me see, if I were a terrorist trying to sneak into Canada so I could board a ship bound for the states, and I could get as far as the waterfront in front of the market, I certainly could get as far as...

08 August, 2010
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